Robert Kresge, author of a series of historical mysteries set in 1870s Wyoming. Kresge says he writes about the Old West because "history matters." He settled on Wyoming because of its pivotal nature during those years, leading the way with women's rights, in natural history with dinosaurs and the country's first national park, and visits from presidents, Russian grand dukes, and Buffalo Bill.
Kresge's two protagonists, male and female, are both newcomers to Wyoming but from very different backgrounds, Texas and Buffalo, New York. The use of protagonists of both genders works well in helping to demonstrate the different treatment of women in the Wyoming Territory. Their different backgrounds lead to misunderstandings but also allow them to bring different strengths to the investigating they must do.
Here is a link to buy Kresge's books.
Robert Kresge Bio
As a boy, I camped with my family
across the West, soaking up the grandeur of our most scenic national parks,
learned to ride in the Grand Tetons, and saw first-hand the plight of modern
Indians on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. As an avid reader, I
decided early on I wanted to be a writer, so I got a Bachelor of Journalism
from the University of Missouri. One course that stuck with me was “The
Twilight of the Sioux,” taught by Dr. John Neihardt, transcriber of the famed
memoir Black Elk Speaks
In 2000, I founded a still active
writers group at CIA that grew to 180 members. I took two courses in 2001 and
2002 -- “The American West in Fiction and Film” and “The Worlds of Mysteries”
under Judy Riggin at Northern Virginia Community College— that got me started
writing Murder for Greenhorns. I
studied writing under mystery author Noreen Wald (aka "Nora Charles")
in 2002.
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I helped found the Albuquerque
chapter of Sisters in Crime in 2004 and was 2008 president. While writing and
revising Greenhorns, I spoke on a panel on spy novels at MWA’s Edgars
symposium in 2002, a panel on settings at Left Coast Crime Seattle in 2007,
and a panel on research and realism at LCC Denver in 2008.
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For those new to your
series, can you describe your series? How would you describe the Warbonnet mysteries to someone who has not read any of your previous novels?
The Warbonnet mysteries are set in a small (130) Wyoming
town on the Oregon Trail in the (so far) early 1870s. In the first novel,
Murder for Greenhorns, 19-year-old newly minted Eastern schoolteacher
and 22-year-old former Texas cowboy Monday Malone witness the ambush shooting
of their traveling companion, Warbonnet’s marshal-to-be Sam Taggart.
Since Monday finds the shooter’s tracks lead toward Warbonnet, their
destination, he reasons the killer must have come from there. Kate is
upset at the callous crime and doesn’t want to be living in the same town as a
murderer. Since she and Taggart were both hired sight unseen on the basis
of letters, she convinces a reluctant but smitten Monday to take the letters
and the dead man’s place, reasoning that only the killer might know the real
Taggart but would be reluctant to admit that. After a successful solution
to the crime, at great danger to themselves, Kate convinces Monday not to ride
on to Montana as he intended, but to stay in Warbonnet and become the new
marshal in his own name.
In a nutshell, the Warbonnet mysteries are like Dr. Quinn
meets Murder She Wrote. My Civil War spy novel is like Cold
Mountain meets The Day of the Jackal.
I was inspired to write this series by John McPhee’s geology
book Rising From the Plains, in which the geologist’s mother came to
Wyoming to teach school in 1905 and had to endure a three-day stagecoach ride
to get from the nearest railroad station to her school. I coupled that
with a character from a 1957 Western called Ten Against Caesar, in which
a young Texas cowboy identified only by the first name Monday was a major
character.
Painted Women, the first of many sequels to Greenhorns,
takes place a year later, in the summer of 1871. Monday, now marshal of
Warbonnet and a deputy sheriff of Albany county, learns that the last member of
his foster family, his brother Tom, has been framed for murder in Laramie, the
county seat. Kate Shaw longs for home back East and considers leaving
Wyoming. As a budding artist, she concocts a scheme to experience the
glories of the West by joining the Hayden expedition to Yellowstone.
Separated by fate, Monday and Kate struggle to clear Tom and survive threats to
their own lives. Torn by conflicted feelings for each other, Kate and
Monday are reunited in Laramie at the eleventh hour. Can they sift clues
and eliminate suspects to unmask the real killer before Tom hangs?
What's your
writing process? What is a typical writing day like for you? Do you keep to a
set schedule? What are your writing habits?
Since I have three sequels to Greenhorns written and
a standalone Civil War spy novel, I have no current writing process except to
revise my manuscripts and continue to outline Warbonnet #5, set in 1874.
However, when I was writing first drafts, I developed habits which I passed
along to the 180 members of the writers group I founded at CIA in 2000:
a.
Start
writing early. If you find you’re good at it, you’ll be glad you
didn’t wait until your 50’s like I did. If you have to struggle, then
you’ll still have plenty of time to read books on writing, take classes,
network at conferences, and join a critique group.
b.
Develop
good writing habits/schedule commensurate with your career and family
situations. Your family expects to see you on weekends. I used to
write two hours each evening, Monday thru Thursday. I have an
understanding wife, and we did family things Friday nights and weekends.
c.
As soon as you’ve started writing, you’re a
writer already (see point 7 below). Work into your introductions or conversations “I’m a writer.”
You never know who the person sitting next to you may be—an agent, an editor,
an author, or related to one.
d.
Oh, and it stands to reason that the best advice is finish the book or story.
Leave revising to the time after you finish the first draft. And note
when you finished that first draft on your calendar. No matter how many
things you write and how successful you become, you can only finish the first
draft of your first work once.
What
projects, literary or otherwise, are occupying you at the moment?
Revising the manuscript of the third Warbonnet mystery and
trying to decide whether to publish the Civil War spy novel as an original
e-book.
Who were your
literary influences growing up? Are there any authors (living or dead) that you
would name as influences?
My literary influences growing up were Edgar Rice Burroughs
and the sci-fi trio of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert
Heinlein. Starting in the 1990s, the authors who most inspired and
influenced me were Tony Hillerman, Margaret Coel, and Ellis Peters.
When I said my two biggest influences were Tony Hillerman
and Margaret Coel, it was because they alternated chapters from the POVs of two
co-equal protagonists. Jim Chee and Joe Leaphorn, starting with Skinwalkers,
worked the same case from different angles, usually getting to the solution at
about the same time by different routes. They often did not confide their
progress in each other or did not have time to do so, in the press of sudden
insight.
Margaret Coel did the same thing with Father John O’Malley
and Vickie Holden, never so at odds as when they pursued different suspects in
her most recent work, The Spider’s Web. There could be no
romance between the two, but I wanted to add romantic/sexual tension between my
coequals. I’ve introduced romantic rivals, misassumptions, and widely
different backgrounds to complicate solving mysteries for my two sleuths.
And I’m not done throwing obstacles in their paths yet. I do get email
asking when they’re going to hook up, but as J.K. Rowling famously said of
writing anguished situations for Harry, Ron, and Hermione: “These are my
characters. I invented them. I own them. And I’ll twist and
torture them any way I please.”
I couldn’t have started my series without Tony and
Margaret’s books, which sustained me during years of auto commuting through
their books on CD.
What
inspired you to write your first novel? Had you always wanted to be a writer?
As an avid reader in high school (600 paperbacks in my
personal library), I always wanted to be a writer. I got a Bachelor of
Journalism degree in 1968 from the world’s oldest, largest, and best school of
journalism, and, after Vietnam, joined the CIA and became an intelligence
analyst. After retiring in 2002, I was already finished with the first
draft of Murder for Greenhorns.
I worked with two critique groups on the manuscripts of Greenhorns
and Painted Women. We knew how effective critique groups
operate and I took between 50 and 90 percent of the advice I received.
What is your
advice to aspiring writers? How important is it for a young writer to be a
reader? What would you recommend they read?
For aspiring writers? Everybody who begins to write is
a writer. You mean aspiring authors, those whose names appear on
covers or magazine or short story bylines. The best advice I can give are
points 2 a-d above. It is absolutely critical for a writer of any age
to read a lot, especially in a genre or nonfiction subject you’d like to be
published in. Get to know the conventions of the field that is your
goal. Don’t be like Stephanie Meyers or Sarah Palin; no one should try to
write a book without having read one first. If they’re hoping to write
mysteries, read Write Now! Mysteries that was just published and
features exercises by 86 published authors. After that the three most
useful books are Writing and Selling Your Mystery by Hallie Ephron, Don’t
Murder Your Mystery by Chris Reardon, and Lessons From a Lifetime of
Writing by David Morrell (Rambo).
What is the
most surprising thing you’ve learned in your writing career? What has been the
hardest part about being a writer?
The most surprising thing I learned is that in general
agents don’t want to talk to you unless you have a publisher and publishers
don’t want to talk to you unless you have an agent. However, the changing
nature of the publishing business is that virtually anyone can get published now
if you’re not in it for fame or fortune, but just for the satisfaction of
getting the stories inside you out there. The hardest part was spending
eight years accumulating hundreds of rejection slips from agents and publishers
who couldn’t get their heads around the concept that the Old West is just as
valid a setting for historical mysteries as ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, the
Middle Ages, Victorian Europe, or even 1920s Melbourne, Australia.
There. Inside all that excess verbiage are some
nuggets aspiring authors might use. Have faith in yourself. Keep
writing. And as Tim Allen said in Galaxy Quest: “Never give
up. Never surrender.”
